Morality/chivalry, as noted above, is an "arms-control pact". Among men. Women have no use for morality, biologically speaking. Morality is invented by the alpha males of a society. Women become the morality that they create, and beta males, the majority of males in a society, must rise to the moral standard set by women as a reproductive strategy, otherwise they don't gain sexual access to women (that is to say, most men are actually submissive to women). Thus women are the moral core of society. If women go bad, then the majority of men go bad since being moral no longer has any reproductive value.

Women as a group are hard-coded by evolution to become neurotic (typified by heightened levels of anxiety and depression) when they sense a power vacuum above them, whether through the absence or corruption of the alpha males. This is nature's way of warning them that there is something wrong. This dereliction can be manifested as feelings of betrayal, and might develop socially as a desire for women to assert their independence, but with an underlying animosity toward men and a repudiation of tradition. Women are vulnerable when they reproduce and they need to secure resources to protect their children, otherwise the tribe does not continue to exist. Therefore they become Machiavellian in order to secure those resources, whether it is through prostitution, stealing, fraud, or whatever.

In medieval Catholicism, the Virgin Mary was greatly revered. It is the closest thing to a "great goddess" that we have at a high level of civilization in the real world. It was, and is, said that Mary achieves her power through submission to God. This is a mythological formulation of the above mentioned relationship between alpha males, women, and beta males.

The problem with a theoretical matriarchy is that women gain no reproductive advantage by being the alphas of a society and it tends to occur as an "assume crash positions" strategy of survival for the tribe. Due to biological programming there would be a natural tendency for the Virgin Mary as alpha to become Lolth the Demon Queen of Spiders.

Most often male deities symbolize protection/tyranny and female deities represent creation/destruction, in other words spiritual male is associated with both the positive and negative aspects of society and its rules and values, while spiritual female is associated with the positive and negative aspects of nature. Monotheisms thus tend to have a male deity at the apex to represent the moral consensus regarding good and evil which the society has established.

Catholicism provides a model for how it works in the real world, but for a fantasy world one must rely on conjecture.

Quote from: MightybrainMarriage predates religion and dominates human society (in fact behavior similar to marriage is apparent throughout the animal kingdom) so I can't see any religion opposing or prohibiting marriage lasting long...

Most likely the two go hand in hand, since there is no human culture that does not have religion (totemism is the simplest form). Religion serves two major functions: to prevent the human mind from coming apart and to preserve the wisdom of lived experience holistically through myth and story.

The natural state of the human mind is insanity, which is the cost of human intelligence. Without religion, people as a whole tend to become neurotic, and that neuroticism can degenerate into full blown psychosis. Objective reality is too complex for the human brain to manage, therefore there must be a holistic system in order to process and organize the mass of data into a form that is usable -- that is why we have both a left brain and a right brain, not two left brains.

The purpose of marriage is so that the community knows who the father of the child is. Imagine an attractive 14-year-old girl who turns up pregnant. EVERYONE wants to know who the father is. Every married woman wants to know, because it better NOT be her husband. Every man who wants to marry her wants to know. Her father especially wants to know. In short, there is a good chance that a murder is about to be committed. Marriage is a social contract that avoids that sort of chaos and unnecessary homicides.

Also, without knowing who the father is, it is impossible to construct the lineages upon which tribal society is based.

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse on January 05, 2021, 05:13:31 AM
Morality/chivalry, as noted above, is an "arms-control pact". Among men. Women have no use for morality, biologically speaking. Morality is invented by the alpha males of a society. Women become the morality that they create, and beta males, the majority of males in a society, must rise to the moral standard set by women as a reproductive strategy, otherwise they don't gain sexual access to women (that is to say, most men are actually submissive to women). Thus women are the moral core of society. If women go bad, then the majority of men go bad since being moral no longer has any reproductive value.

Women as a group are hard-coded by evolution to become neurotic (typified by heightened levels of anxiety and depression) when they sense a power vacuum above them, whether through the absence or corruption of the alpha males. This is nature's way of warning them that there is something wrong. This dereliction can be manifested as feelings of betrayal, and might develop socially as a desire for women to assert their independence, but with an underlying animosity toward men and a repudiation of tradition. Women are vulnerable when they reproduce and they need to secure resources to protect their children, otherwise the tribe does not continue to exist. Therefore they become Machiavellian in order to secure those resources, whether it is through prostitution, stealing, fraud, or whatever.

Ummmmm ...  source?  You strike a very authoritative tone, but I'm not familiar with any actual authority that takes this position.

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper on January 04, 2021, 01:56:01 PMI know nothing about OP's setting, but that sort of thing could potentially be avoided via magic. If you don't want the priestesses doing big flashy D&D style spells, they could still do something more subtle to assure loyalty of their protectors.

Maybe something like a Witcher style process as the price of entry to the order which makes them more powerful, but reliant upon a steady supply of some sort of medicine which the priestesses keep secret. Or they make with their special magic from their goddess. Or something in-between.

That is certainly possible. I forgot to address the Praetorian Guard question before. I want the priestesses of this church to have some magical ability, but I want it to be relatively rare and subtle, as it is a lowish magic setting, with a few exceptions. Would these guards need to be pressed into loyalty through magic? Not necessarily. Even witnessing a few "miracles" could make them very devout, especially if their upbringing and subculture encourages it. Are such military forces always a danger of taking over the organization they protect? I'm not sure, but it seems like frequently they don't. It depends on a number of complex factors. If there are other influential military forces at play or if the people are highly opinionated on the issue then it may be hard for a bodyguard force to control an organization like a church. I think maybe full fledged control or queen making might be a bit too drastic, but I could see these knights (I need a name for them) having some influence on the church especially if other factions are at odds - where these guys side could be crucial factor. There is also the issue of how centralized or decentralized these warriors are. If they are very decentralized, even factionalized, then they may have trouble unifying to exert that kind of control and may in fact hold each other in check.

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse on January 05, 2021, 05:13:31 AM
Morality/chivalry, as noted above, is an "arms-control pact". Among men. Women have no use for morality, biologically speaking. Morality is invented by the alpha males of a society. Women become the morality that they create, and beta males, the majority of males in a society, must rise to the moral standard set by women as a reproductive strategy, otherwise they don't gain sexual access to women (that is to say, most men are actually submissive to women). Thus women are the moral core of society. If women go bad, then the majority of men go bad since being moral no longer has any reproductive value.

Women as a group are hard-coded by evolution to become neurotic (typified by heightened levels of anxiety and depression) when they sense a power vacuum above them, whether through the absence or corruption of the alpha males. This is nature's way of warning them that there is something wrong. This dereliction can be manifested as feelings of betrayal, and might develop socially as a desire for women to assert their independence, but with an underlying animosity toward men and a repudiation of tradition. Women are vulnerable when they reproduce and they need to secure resources to protect their children, otherwise the tribe does not continue to exist. Therefore they become Machiavellian in order to secure those resources, whether it is through prostitution, stealing, fraud, or whatever.

In medieval Catholicism, the Virgin Mary was greatly revered. It is the closest thing to a "great goddess" that we have at a high level of civilization in the real world. It was, and is, said that Mary achieves her power through submission to God. This is a mythological formulation of the above mentioned relationship between alpha males, women, and beta males.

The problem with a theoretical matriarchy is that women gain no reproductive advantage by being the alphas of a society and it tends to occur as an "assume crash positions" strategy of survival for the tribe. Due to biological programming there would be a natural tendency for the Virgin Mary as alpha to become Lolth the Demon Queen of Spiders.

Most often male deities symbolize protection/tyranny and female deities represent creation/destruction, in other words spiritual male is associated with both the positive and negative aspects of society and its rules and values, while spiritual female is associated with the positive and negative aspects of nature. Monotheisms thus tend to have a male deity at the apex to represent the moral consensus regarding good and evil which the society has established.

Catholicism provides a model for how it works in the real world, but for a fantasy world one must rely on conjecture.

Quote from: MightybrainMarriage predates religion and dominates human society (in fact behavior similar to marriage is apparent throughout the animal kingdom) so I can't see any religion opposing or prohibiting marriage lasting long...

Most likely the two go hand in hand, since there is no human culture that does not have religion (totemism is the simplest form). Religion serves two major functions: to prevent the human mind from coming apart and to preserve the wisdom of lived experience holistically through myth and story.

The natural state of the human mind is insanity, which is the cost of human intelligence. Without religion, people as a whole tend to become neurotic, and that neuroticism can degenerate into full blown psychosis. Objective reality is too complex for the human brain to manage, therefore there must be a holistic system in order to process and organize the mass of data into a form that is usable -- that is why we have both a left brain and a right brain, not two left brains.

The purpose of marriage is so that the community knows who the father of the child is. Imagine an attractive 14-year-old girl who turns up pregnant. EVERYONE wants to know who the father is. Every married woman wants to know, because it better NOT be her husband. Every man who wants to marry her wants to know. Her father especially wants to know. In short, there is a good chance that a murder is about to be committed. Marriage is a social contract that avoids that sort of chaos and unnecessary homicides.

Also, without knowing who the father is, it is impossible to construct the lineages upon which tribal society is based.

Quote from: Mishihari on January 05, 2021, 07:44:30 AMUmmmmm ...  source?  You strike a very authoritative tone, but I'm not familiar with any actual authority that takes this position.

Cloyer makes some interesting claims and a lot of them likely have some basis in reality. I also think it's a bit of an oversimplification. I don't want to get bogged down too much on discussing real world gender issues, but I will touch on them a bit in this reply.

Firstly, I think it would be fun to make this matriarchal church that has similarities to real world churches but also has major differences. I think that it would be interesting and kind of a neat thought experiment and I'm curious how players might react. So, it may well be the case that it's unrealistic in some regards, that should go without saying because it's not the real world. That doesn't mean that I would reject realism entirely, I think it's good to keep fantasy somewhat grounded in reality or at least the perception of reality, but I also don't want such concerns to limit fun or creativity too much. Of course, I did ask for opinions about matriarchal chivalry with the implication that real world concerns should factor in, so I'm entirely open to discussing such topics in regard to my setting, but I would balance realism against other factors, including my own vision of the setting.

Let's me address some of these topics more specifically.

Both men and women have use for morality and both men and women have influenced moral codes of every human society, based in part of the specific characteristics and interests of each gender. Of course, such moral codes likely have more to do with group survival as a whole rather than the specific interests of males and females. In a patriarchal civilization (which historically is most if not all of them) the men in charge are going to create codes of conduct that facilitate that patriarchy. Other sorts of less patriarchal systems - some tribal societies, small isolated ones, or (and this is the big one we ignore) modern society - are going to have different moral systems or codes of behavior.

Do women become neurotic if there aren't men in charge of them? I don't know if that is true or not and it would likely be hard to prove. There may well also be exceptions even if it was the general trend.

Women also do indeed need help raising children. Not only for the times that we are pregnant or nursing but when children are young and need resources, protection, supervision, etc. How ever society organizes itself, there must be women having babies and they must have help from non-mothers including men. A common way for this to happen historically was marriage - so that a man can be confident that his wife's children are his and so he feels good about protecting and investing in his wife (or wives) and children. Marriage also has the added benefit of allowing less competition between men because it is a huge taboo to cuckold another man. That isn't the only way to secure help for mothers though, not even in Western civilization where marriage has been very common and powerful. The nuclear family is a isolated and complete unit is kind of a common thing. Historically extended families lived closely together and helped each other, in fact the entire tribe or village was kind of an extended family. It was likely the industrial revolution and the needs of business and industry that shifted the focus from the extended family to the nuclear family. In agrarian villages, absent the taboos against premarital sex, a single mother could receive the aid of the rest of her family. Surely there were many young medieval widows who lost their husbands to war, injury, accident, or illness and who were able to successfully raise their children with the help of siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, and neighbors.

In some smaller groups, where marriage as is practiced in the major civilizations is unusual, sometimes a mother receives help not from her baby's father but from her brothers. The uncles are the paternal figure in a child's life rather than the biological father and those uncles can (evolutionarily) feel confident that they are helping their own genes in their kinship to their sisters. Of course, groups that do this are small and for the most part didn't develop full fledged civilization like more patriarchal groups did. Is that because there is some disadvantage to this kind of arrangement? Probably so, but just because there are some disadvantages doesn't mean that it is impossible.

We also can look at modern society that puts less focus on marriage and monogamy than we did in the past but also has government funded aid and safety nets for single mothers like welfare, food stamps, paternity payments, public school, and (depending on the country) numerous other government programs. Could a pre-modern society support that sort of system of aid for single mothers whose families didn't help them? Possibly so, maybe administered by the church. As with any society, it is going to be hard for large institutions to make up for lack of familial support.

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse on January 05, 2021, 05:13:31 AM
The problem with a theoretical matriarchy is that women gain no reproductive advantage by being the alphas of a society and it tends to occur as an "assume crash positions" strategy of survival for the tribe. Due to biological programming there would be a natural tendency for the Virgin Mary as alpha to become Lolth the Demon Queen of Spiders.

Is it true that women gain no reproductive advantage by being the alphas of society? I think that is potentially incorrect, though it may be misleading to call women the alphas of this arrangement. From an evolutionary perspective, what is the ideal male lifestyle? Likely being a king with a harem of hundreds of wives and concubines for the king to impregnate while the peasants do the work to support the king and his kids. It's a bit of an extreme example, but that would be maximum male reproductive success. What about maximum female reproductive success? Well, because a woman can only have so many children herself, she doesn't need lots of husbands. She needs to best husband. Maximum female reproductive success would be to have babies with the most alpha of alpha men possible and then to have a bunch of peasants supply resources to the woman and her kids to increase the odds of survival. Both cases are extreme and, in fact, they kind of match up in a way. The people who get screwed, ironically, are the men who don't. That is the beta men who would have to supply resources to the alphas without getting sex or passing on their genes. Of course, in reality we don't see anything quite so extreme, but there is a tendency for that, especially when there is a decline in morality.

Anyway, marriage keeps the above from happening, it moderates the more extreme nature of both men and women, to create a more stable society and sop has reproductive advantages.

Would a matriarchal system present women with an evolutionary advantage? I can potentially see some. Assuming that system I mentioned earlier that is run by women and has no marriage. Without marriage or monogamy, the women are going to be free to do it with the most alpha guys. Even if men were shut out of political power, there would still be macho manly alpha guys, that isn't always associated with political power. We could all imagine a plausible scenario where a young woman is married off to a king with great temporal power is isn't very attractive for some reason - maybe he comes from an extremely inbred royal line and he is mentally disabled and physical deformed - and then the young queen has an affair with the relatively powerless but manly and sexy castle guardsman. So even without political power (which isn't a given in this scenario) there would still be alpha men who are desired by women and who would even be more available without monogamy getting in the way. That is one aspect of female reproductive success that is fulfilled by this system. The other is getting resources from less desirable men. That is potentially harder, though if this religion encourages communities to help mothers and babies or even if it demands tithes and uses those tithes to generally support mothers and children, then it is effectively working towards that ideal female reproductive strategy. Assuming it doesn't cause some kind of societal collapse, which is possible I suppose, but highly speculative. This is actually kind of what happens in modern first world countries where government aid and laws help support single mothers who were probably impregnated by alpha types.

This may be a moot point though, as there are all kinds of religious and social structures in society that don't seem to have an evolutionary advantage. Christianity preaches pacifism, celibacy, and poverty and while in practice most Christians aren't those things, many of the clergy follow that ideal.

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse on January 05, 2021, 05:13:31 AM
The purpose of marriage is so that the community knows who the father of the child is. Imagine an attractive 14-year-old girl who turns up pregnant. EVERYONE wants to know who the father is. Every married woman wants to know, because it better NOT be her husband. Every man who wants to marry her wants to know. Her father especially wants to know. In short, there is a good chance that a murder is about to be committed. Marriage is a social contract that avoids that sort of chaos and unnecessary homicides.

Also, without knowing who the father is, it is impossible to construct the lineages upon which tribal society is based.

In a society where maternal; support is heavily tied to fatherhood, then yes everybody wants to know who the father is. An important taboo has been broken, important because marriage is what allows men to know who their children are and thus lets them support those children and their mother. In a society where fatherly support of the mother and children in less important, then who the father is isn't as important either. The child knows who his or her mother is, and that is the lineage valued by the society, and the mother's relatives can also be sure that the child is related to them as well and would want to support that mother and child. Including uncles who would have no specific fatherly obligations to their own biological children, if any.

Also, as I touched on above, I fully believe that evolutionary psychology influences every topic we are discussing, but it isn't the end all and be all determining factor of what a religion or culture must be.

I'm not complaining here, just trying to discuss the issues brought up in the post above. The values of this church (as I've so far described them) might not work for maintaining a civilization, but I also think that it is a very complicated matter to consider. 

Quote from: Mishihari on January 05, 2021, 07:44:30 AM

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse on January 05, 2021, 05:13:31 AM
Morality/chivalry, as noted above, is an "arms-control pact". Among men. Women have no use for morality, biologically speaking. Morality is invented by the alpha males of a society. Women become the morality that they create, and beta males, the majority of males in a society, must rise to the moral standard set by women as a reproductive strategy, otherwise they don't gain sexual access to women (that is to say, most men are actually submissive to women). Thus women are the moral core of society. If women go bad, then the majority of men go bad since being moral no longer has any reproductive value.

Women as a group are hard-coded by evolution to become neurotic (typified by heightened levels of anxiety and depression) when they sense a power vacuum above them, whether through the absence or corruption of the alpha males. This is nature's way of warning them that there is something wrong. This dereliction can be manifested as feelings of betrayal, and might develop socially as a desire for women to assert their independence, but with an underlying animosity toward men and a repudiation of tradition. Women are vulnerable when they reproduce and they need to secure resources to protect their children, otherwise the tribe does not continue to exist. Therefore they become Machiavellian in order to secure those resources, whether it is through prostitution, stealing, fraud, or whatever.

Ummmmm ...  source?  You strike a very authoritative tone, but I'm not familiar with any actual authority that takes this position.

LOL!  Four thousand years of people living, believing, and advocating these ideas count for nothing.  Instead, some guy who slept through 6-8 years of college, got his letters after his name, paid 50 of his students to take a survey, and then published a paper somewhere is the gold standard (this is NOT an exaggeration in the soft sciences).  No wonder so many people in the Western world are so easily hoodwinked by whoever blathers in front of a camera.

"Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, 'Is it reasonable?'" - Richard Feynman

You might consider an adapted version of the Heinlein idea in Starship Troopers, where the only way to get "citizenship" is to enroll in one of the services.  Only in your case, the only way to get the fantasy equivalent of citizenship is to procreate.  There's a subtle bias towards woman inherent in that, since it is easier for the woman to prove that she is the mother.  That does bring back in the idea that males very much care to prove that they are the father, but for different reasons than in Western history.  (Also, lots of ways to try to cheat the system and thus the various means to thwart and discourage such cheats.)

That doesn't force the issue of marriage one way or the other or to any particular degree.  Instead, there are probably different sects within the religion that have very definite ideas about marriage or lack of it, around what they see as the best way to establish who are first-class citizens.  At the very least, you've got those that have had children, those that are thought to have had children by their peers but can't prove it, those that are thought to be capable of producing children but haven't yet, those suspected of being incapable, and those known to be incapable.  Of the latter, they may be effectively slaves not because slaves are castrated but because the castrated can't rise any higher.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on January 05, 2021, 11:02:38 AM
You might consider an adapted version of the Heinlein idea in Starship Troopers, where the only way to get "citizenship" is to enroll in one of the services.  Only in your case, the only way to get the fantasy equivalent of citizenship is to procreate.  There's a subtle bias towards woman inherent in that, since it is easier for the woman to prove that she is the mother.  That does bring back in the idea that males very much care to prove that they are the father, but for different reasons than in Western history.  (Also, lots of ways to try to cheat the system and thus the various means to thwart and discourage such cheats.)

That doesn't force the issue of marriage one way or the other or to any particular degree.  Instead, there are probably different sects within the religion that have very definite ideas about marriage or lack of it, around what they see as the best way to establish who are first-class citizens.  At the very least, you've got those that have had children, those that are thought to have had children by their peers but can't prove it, those that are thought to be capable of producing children but haven't yet, those suspected of being incapable, and those known to be incapable.  Of the latter, they may be effectively slaves not because slaves are castrated but because the castrated can't rise any higher.

It seems like that might be a really hard system to track and verify. It seems like a required tithe to the church, subsequently used in part to fund motherhood, might be easier and more beneficial. I guess it also opens the door for what citizenship entails.

Medieval Chivalry was already deeply connected to the veneration of Mary, which was something almost all the orders of religious knights engaged in pretty seriously.  It also had the code of Chivalric love, ostensibly a chaste love meant to show great veneration to damsels and ladies.

Quote from: RPGPundit on January 05, 2021, 11:01:55 PM
Medieval Chivalry was already deeply connected to the veneration of Mary, which was something almost all the orders of religious knights engaged in pretty seriously.  It also had the code of Chivalric love, ostensibly a chaste love meant to show great veneration to damsels and ladies.

   Are we allowed to talk about that? After all, the hobby has a 40-year history of Christophobia ...

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse on January 05, 2021, 05:13:31 AMMorality is invented by the alpha males of a society. Women become the morality that they create, and beta males, the majority of males in a society, must rise to the moral standard set by women as a reproductive strategy, otherwise they don't gain sexual access to women (that is to say, most men are actually submissive to women).

Within the space of two sentences, you claim both that morality is invented by alpha males, AND that morality is created by women. You can't have both.

Quote from: Premier on January 06, 2021, 10:36:41 AM

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse on January 05, 2021, 05:13:31 AMMorality is invented by the alpha males of a society. Women become the morality that they create, and beta males, the majority of males in a society, must rise to the moral standard set by women as a reproductive strategy, otherwise they don't gain sexual access to women (that is to say, most men are actually submissive to women).

Within the space of two sentences, you claim both that morality is invented by alpha males, AND that morality is created by women. You can't have both.

Morality, in part, helps to constrain the behavior of both women and alpha males. That isn't all that morality does, but in most civilized societies morality puts limits on both.

Quote from: Bren on December 31, 2020, 05:07:54 PM
Certainly one option would be to assume the values are the same. But I'd avoid that. Instead I'd go the Pendragon route and consider what are the virtues the goddess and her religion values. Pendragon does a good job of making the three main religious systems - Christianity, Paganism, and Wotanism distinct and making knights or elite warriors in those systems noticeably different in what they value and strive to attain. So in Pendragon

So for the three main religions

• Christian Religious Virtues are: Chaste, Forgiving, Merciful, Modest, and Temperate. Christian Characters possessing one or more of these traits at a value of 16+ gain a Religious bonus.
  
• Pagan Religious Virtues are Lustful, Energetic, Generous, Honest, and Proud. This covers British and Welsh pagans.
  
• Wotanic Religious Virtues are Generous, Honest, Proud, Worldly, and Indulgent. This covers Germanic and Scandinavian pagans.

Later they added Heathens

• The Heathen Religious Virtues are Vengeful, Honest, Arbitrary, Proud, and Worldly. This covers Saracens and Picts.

For knightly chivalry I'd add in the virtue of Valorous or being brave.

I fully support Bren's idea. The Pendragon way or the highway !

Quote from: ShieldWife on January 05, 2021, 10:26:07 AM
In some smaller groups, where marriage as is practiced in the major civilizations is unusual, sometimes a mother receives help not from her baby's father but from her brothers. The uncles are the paternal figure in a child's life rather than the biological father and those uncles can (evolutionarily) feel confident that they are helping their own genes in their kinship to their sisters. Of course, groups that do this are small and for the most part didn't develop full fledged civilization like more patriarchal groups did. Is that because there is some disadvantage to this kind of arrangement? Probably so, but just because there are some disadvantages doesn't mean that it is impossible.

Actually, you DO see shades of this in Medieval society.

Maternal uncles were common choices for fosterage (if a young man needs to learn how to fight, receiving training from a warrior uncle is a common way in fiction; as the uncle can go harder on the protagonist than the father could before looking like a jackass) and for looking after nieces and nephews whose parents have died precisely because their kinship is absolutely assured in an era where fatherhood couldn't be decisively proven (maternal aunts were a close second, but given the patriarchal society an uncle was more likely to have the means of supporting you and "sister's kid" provides motivation while the head of the household being asked to support his "wife's sister's kid" doesn't have the "genetic imperative" and so tends to come up more when the desire is for the child to be subject to injustice by their relatives).

Quote from: ShieldWife on January 05, 2021, 10:26:07 AM
That is certainly possible. I forgot to address the Praetorian Guard question before. I want the priestesses of this church to have some magical ability, but I want it to be relatively rare and subtle, as it is a lowish magic setting, with a few exceptions. Would these guards need to be pressed into loyalty through magic? Not necessarily. Even witnessing a few "miracles" could make them very devout, especially if their upbringing and subculture encourages it. Are such military forces always a danger of taking over the organization they protect? I'm not sure, but it seems like frequently they don't. It depends on a number of complex factors. If there are other influential military forces at play or if the people are highly opinionated on the issue then it may be hard for a bodyguard force to control an organization like a church. I think maybe full fledged control or queen making might be a bit too drastic, but I could see these knights (I need a name for them) having some influence on the church especially if other factions are at odds - where these guys side could be crucial factor. There is also the issue of how centralized or decentralized these warriors are. If they are very decentralized, even factionalized, then they may have trouble unifying to exert that kind of control and may in fact hold each other in check.

Leaving aside the real-world controversies, I think a big question is how would the matriarchal society be different from historical chivalry?

I gave some ideas earlier that were more about looking a bit like what are traditionally bad guys in fantasy (witches). A different model might be the Haudenosaunee society (aka Iroquois). They had a strong military society - but they were matrilocal, where a husband would go to live with his wife's clan. Each extended family would live in a long house and organize around that. Males were still dominant in most of war and government - but in a fantasy parallel, women might have more of a primary role.

Among them, there were parallel government structures - a council of men and a council of women. They had strictly defined spheres of influence - so being matrilocal, clan and house were governed by the women, while other issues were governed by the men.

With religious and magical power, a version of this could exist with women being more powerful. For example, women's councils could be in charge of strategy and treaties, even if men are still charged with the tactics and fighting. Given a strong religious belief, the treaties and strategy might revolve around rare magic and soothsaying.

As for what might be different about a code of chivalry... For one, there might be more focus on families as units to judge and interact with, rather than individuals. So if a young man misbehaves, the family might be punished for raising him wrong and/or failing to control him. That puts more emphasis and responsibility on child-rearing.